SAFe defines the Program Board as follows http://www.scaledagileframework.com/pi-planning/ As a matter of fact, Rational Team Concert (RTC) does not, including IBM's additional SAFe support, provide a similar visualization out-of-the-box . Therefore we have decided to implement a brand new feature named " show dependencies " into the Timebox Planning Widget V2.9.1 This Feature is planned to be available as freeware in coming fall 2016. Feature... [More]

Is Scrum and/or SAFe the Framework you want to go for? Are you in Systems Engineering with HW, FW and SW Teams and need to maintain a rolling lookahead plan with lots of dependencies ? Are your Teams distributed all over the world? If you can answer some of the questions with YES I highly recommend you to give the brand new Rational Team Concert Timebox Planning Widget V2.8.7 with SAFe support a chance. It fully supports SAFe on the Levels Value Stream , Program and Team Of course we... [More]

About two years ago, we started the Learning Circles initiative to provide simple and structured educational material on some IBM Rational products. There are now 11 published Learning Circles that you can leverage for your own enablement, or for self-paced training in your organization. To align the material with latest product releases, the CLM and the RTC Learning Circles have been recently updated. They now include specific material on CLM 5.0 (and even 5.0.2 for RTC). Earlier this year, we also worked with Scaled Agile Inc. to update... [More]

A few weeks ago during an agile adoption seminar with a program manager considering using agile, I was asked to evaluate approaches to scaling agile practices to support adoption by a large program for their enterprise. This program had already adopted some basic agile practices (such as daily meetings, stories and Scrum) but felt they weren’t getting the benefits that other, smaller teams, got from “going agile”. At first I thought this would be an easy exercise, given over the years I have had to assist several large... [More]

This week, we have released Rational Team Concert 5.0.1 with new features to improve support for agile teams who are using Scrum and Kanban. Among other things, this new RTC version provides enhancements for planning, reporting, usability, traceability, and performance. It also includes a “hidden” capability, the “ Quick Planner Technical Preview ”. Those who are familiar with the cloud offering IBM DevOps Services may already know the Quick Planner. A similar capability is now available as... [More]

Evaluating Different Scaled Agile Approaches In evaluating a process we often look at the following Understand the Process: o What are the Principles, Activities, Roles, Practices, and Deliverables? o Determining how well each approach span the three levels of development? o Does the process meet the organizations needs, the needs of the team, and the individuals involved While each approach has slightly different principles, most adhere to the core... [More]

More and more businesses are attempting to adopt agile across their whole IT portfolio. From maintenance to small projects to large enterprise programs, these organizations want to take advantages of the speed and quality improvements seen by many agile teams. However as an Agile Coach, I often hear questions such as: We need to increase our time to market to stay competitive. However, our organization and culture is heavily based on a waterfall SDLC so how do we make sure our agile teams are successful in the interim?” How can we... [More]

In a recent post, see here , I summarized four of the key DevOps principles, namely: Automate as much of the deployment pipeline as feasible Develop and test against a production-like system Deploy frequently Continuously validate operational quality characteristics Programs and projects adopting continuous delivery practices must create software in such a way that the software can be released to production at any time. ... [More]

DevOps in Practice – Best Practices for Adopting Continuous Delivery In many respects, delivering software updates the last mile to production is often one of the biggest challenges. Product development has worked with the business on defining a innovative product, the architects have architected a first-rate technical solution, the team is designing a great mobile app and the solution has passed the testing suite ensuring quality. However, releasing it to product is often the most difficult and dangerous part of the process. The... [More]

During the Innovate conference earlier this month in Orlando, we delivered a 3-hour workshop on how to use Rational Team Concert with Scrum in agile projects. If you have not been able to travel to Florida, you can access the workshop material and do it on your own. To complete the hands-on exercise, you will access to an RTC environment. Workbooks and instructions are provided here: http://bit.ly/Innovate1063 (File 1_AgileALM_Tutorial_SetupGuide.pdf describes how to set up and configure an RTC environment for the workshop) For... [More]

Last week, IBM DevOps Services was enriched with a new beta feature for tracking and planning. Not sure what will be the exact next of this new feature yet. Some refer to it at the Track and Plan , or the Agile Track&Plan . Other as the Agile Quick Planner . Whatever the name used, the main objective is to make access to work items easier, and to better support Scrum teams in their project activities. It is quite easy to enable this beta feature on your existing project. Simply open the project and select the "Try the new Track... [More]

“If you think you can, or you think you can’t – you’re right.” – Henry Ford Over the past several years, I have heard agile experts claim Scrum does not scale. Many of these experts never really address why they believe Scrum does not scale. Instead, they usually spend their time talking about their own homegrown process—a process that according to them does, in fact, scale. Anyone who is familiar with my articles knows that I am not one to get into process wars. My intention in writing this article is to discuss why I believe Scrum... [More]

“It’s possible to achieve almost anything as long as you are not worried about who gets the credit.” – Harry S. Truman Over the past several years, I have worked with many clients who were in the process of incorporating Scrum that either did not have company-wide implementation or who had contracts with third parties who were using Waterfall and who did not intend to change to Scrum or any other Agile process. This became an issue when the Scrum team(s) were implementing functionality that was required by the Waterfall teams and... [More]

Session 2: Backlog management and release planning Agil e AL M Vi rtua l St udy Grou p Se rie s for information on registration and details on the different sessions During the second session on this series, we review the key element of a Rational Team Concert (RTC) project based on the Scrum-Agile ALM process template. IBM Rational Solution for Agile ALM with Scrum . Explore elements in an Agile ALM project Share a product vision Create and manage a product backlog Plan a release After this session,... [More]

Session 1: Understand and reuse the technical solution assets (See the Agil e AL M Vi rtua l St udy Grou p Se rie s for information on registration and details on the different sessions) During the first session on this series, we want to describe what the IBM Rational Solution for Agile ALM with Scrum is, and what are the technical assets it contains. We also want people to understand how to find, install, and use those assets quickly. So we will cover the following topics: Explore the IBM® Rational... [More]

As promised in Part 1 , I have continued my effort to document the differences between the RTC Scrum template and the Agile ALM Scrum template. The summ ary- of-d iffe renc es docu ment , Lin k-to -Sum mar y , h as been updated with links to detailed information on the revised Defect and Story workflows . (See the first bullet under Work Item Types and Attributes .) The states and actions for these two work item types caused some confusion in the user community. T he Agile ALM Scrum... [More]

At or around Innovate 2013, IBM released a new Agile ALM Scrum process template for RTC. The Agile ALM Scrum template is based on the Scrum template, with modifications promising better support for Agile Planning with Scrum . After reviewing the new template, I became interested in morphing a Scrum-based project to the Agile ALM Scrum definitions. My first step was to create a summary of the differences between the two templates. (Thank you to the template authors for their help in finding and understanding these changes.)... [More]

Recently, Ken Schwaber--an Agile thought leader, co-creator of Scrum and someone I think very highly of--posted a controversial blog entry " unS AFe at A ny S pee d " during Agile2013. During my career as an agile transformation consultant, I have had the opportunity to work with Ken, Dean Leffingwell of SAFe and both Scott Ambler and Mark Lines of Disc ipli ned Agil e De live r y . I have studied their histories, intensely reviewed their current approaches beginning in 2007 and... [More]

Since 2007, IBM has been enabling agile teams from smaller independent teams to those working in large-scale complex environments to become more agile. While others were focused on implementing electronic task boards and questioning whether agile at scale was even possible, IBM Rational was delivering Rational Team Concert on the Jazz platform and enabling distributed teams to embrace the core values and principles of agile, including collaboration, transparency, continuous improvement and adaptability. In 2013, seven years after the bold... [More]

In this blog post , I would like to share some practical experiences gained over past couple of years in Implementing Agile in our team. I intend to write this as a multi part series with each one walking through a different adoption phase for a set of practices we felt were important to implement at particular point in time. I would also like to share on what worked well for us and some pitfalls to avoid . Part 1 : The beginnings Part 2 : Agile Planning And Tracking